“Then I went to the windows and pulled them open. The rain had stopped and the night was very still, black except for the glow behind the western hills that marked the Burning Lands. A dog barked far off, once and no more.”

“He said, speaking more to himself than to me: 'It was knowledge I sought. Knowledge which is clean and pure, far above the cheating and deceiving in which most men spend their lives.'And do you not find it,' I asked, 'this knowledge which you prize?'In part,' he said. 'I find other things, too. Things I do not desire but must accept. There is still cheating and deceiving.”

“...but now that I view the scene in retrospect I see it as a very gentle and firm deportation, taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.”

“More and more I had come to see the Capped as lacking what seemed to me the essence of humanity, the vital spark of defiance against the rulers of the world.”

“I was remembering the things we had done together, the times we had had. It would have been pleasant to preserve that comradeship in the days that came after. Pleasant, but alas, impossible. That which had brought us together had gone, and now our paths diverged, according to our natures and needs. We would meet again, from time to time, but always a little more as strangers; until perhaps at last, as old men with only memories left, we could sit together and try to share them.”

“He was sometimes stern but more often kindly---just according to his lights, but he saw the world in simple shades of black and white, and found it hard to be patient with things that struck him as foolishness.”

“Having achieved what I thought was an ultimate ambition, I found, as I think is often the case, that there remained something more.”